Alexander Andersson

The jury argument draws a structural and moral parallel between jury verdicts and election outcomes: if it is unjust to accept the decision of an incompetent jury, it is likewise unjust to accept the result of an election decided by an incompetent electorate. This paper defends the jury argument against the disanalogy objection raised by Kogelmann and Carroll. While they endorse a right to a competent jury, they reject the analogy and the right to a competent electorate. They argue that enforcing the right to a competent electorate is more expensive and prevents less harm than ensuring jury competence. This paper challenges these claims, arguing that the two are more alike than the objection suggests. Specifically, it argues that enforcing epistocracy is not significantly costlier than ensuring jury competence – whether in terms of resources, psychological harm, or moral risk. Moreover, the domains do not differ in the degree of harm their enforcement helps to prevent. In both cases, the decision-making body plays a pivotal role in enabling harm, the opportunities to challenge bad decision-making are limited, and both are similarly vulnerable to corruption. Taken together, these points suggest that the disanalogy objection fails to undermine the jury argument.

Meritocratic distributions require a background of equal opportunity to be deemed deserved and legitimate. However, standard notions of equality of opportunity are practically and theoretically unattainable. This places the meritocrat in a precarious position. They can either maintain the concept of desert-sensitive merit at the cost of tolerating some degree of arbitrariness in meritocratic distributions or relinquish the notion that meritocratic distributions must be desert-sensitive to be legitimate. This paper argues that the latter approach, coupled with an anti-bottleneck principle, offers a more viable and justifiable path forward for meritocrats.

Napoletano argues that grades, as measurements of academic performance, cannot be deserved. Since grades measure the basis of desert– namely, a student’s performance– they cannot simultaneously function as the object of desert. In this paper, I present two counterarguments to Napoletano’s claim. First, I argue that people can deserve to be measured accurately, as failing to do so can give rise to an injustice. Second, I argue that grades are not measurements but appraisals of student performance. Either claim, independently, undermines Napoletano’s conclusion, demonstrating that grades can indeed be deserved.

It has been suggested that people who will face hardship in the future may deserve our sympathies now. Similar intuitions can be adopted regarding the deservingness of jobs and scholarships, where andidates may be deserving now based on their expected future performance. To accommodate these intuitions, some have contended that desert is sometimes forward-looking. In this paper, I argue that it is a mistake to think of desert as forward-looking. The forward-looking view struggles to explain the deservingness of subjects that have conflicting desert-making features in the future, it requires that we accept asymmetries and exceptions in desert theory and that we commit to a form of moderate determinism. In response, I present a comparative approach that offers a unified framework for explaining forward-looking cases without the drawbacks associated with the forward-looking view.

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are.

Companies continuously make choices about who gets hired and who does not, who gets a raise and who does not, and who gets a promotion and who does not. Those decisions have significant implications for the division of income in society—and consequently for economic inequality. That is why ethical questions about inequality and fairness are important to business ethics. In this chapter, we elaborate, explain, and compare three important ethical principles that can be used to guide decisions about hiring, remuneration, and promotion: the utilitarian, libertarian, and desertist principles.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella received $44,321,738 in total compensation in 2020. His compensation was 257 times the median employee’s pay at Microsoft that year. Nadella’s total compensation was significantly higher than the average compensation for all S&P 500 CEOs, which was $15.5 million in 2020 (AFL-CIO 2022). Even if Nadella can be considered an outlier in this regard, one cannot deny that many CEOs and other executives are paid very generously compared to other workers. This prompts the question: how, if at all, can one defend these pay differences on moral grounds? This entry gives an overview of just pay theories and how they are used to defend and criticize executive pay practices.

Many philosophical books about desert start with the same observation: deserttalk is prevalent in our everyday conversations, but desert plays second fiddle in the philosophical literature. To this regularity, Kevin Kinghorn’s new book about desert is no exception. He notes in the introduction that ‘it remains a surprise to me that not more philosophers have explored why it is that people think desert does so much normative work—as well as exploring the meaning and nature of desert’(p. 2). Kinghorn’s aim in this book is to remedy the gap between people’s intuitions about desert and the philosophical literature by offering a new, general account of desert that explains the common ‘concern’that ‘people have in mind when making desert claims’(p. 2). Given the variety of contexts in which desert claims are made, this is an admirably ambitious project that results in one of the most significant contributions to the desert literature in recent years.

A prominent set of intuitions concerning the just distribution of work-related incomes, such as wages and bonuses, invokes the notion of desert. The general claim of economic desert, we may say, is that economic ‘outputs’ (wages or bonuses) should be distributed according to economic ‘inputs’ (effort or contribution). But how should this claim be understood more exactly? The present chapter seeks to answer this question as well as to address a central ambiguity in the notion of economic desert concerning the relevance of moral assessments and consequences. According to several previous authors, what separates economic desert from other forms of desert, especially from so-called moral desert, is its salient instrumental and institutional— we may say ‘non-moralising’—nature. Economic desert is therefore something quite different from traditional and more moralising variants of desert. However, we will argue that such analyses go too far and that economic desert makes little sense without a stronger moralising component.

Before, during, and after the global financial crisis of 2008, executive pay practices were widely debated and criticized. Economists, philosophers, as well as the man on the street all seem to have strong feelings towards how much, in what ways, and on what grounds executives are paid. This thesis asks whether it is possible to morally justify current executive pay practices and, if so, on what grounds they are justified. It questions those who find no quarrel with pay practices due to their minimally moralized view of the market and – perhaps more importantly – it asks for a sophisticated critique from those who criticize current pay practices. The discussion on just pay is clearly one of distributive justice. One reason for why some people consider CEO pay practices to be (fairly) unproblematic while others find them objectionable stems from the availability of different understandings of, and principles for, just pay. We tend to associate justice in pay with such things as proper incentivization, being the outcome of a fair procedure, being deserved on the basis of effort or contribution, and/or satisfying the ideal of equality. Parts of this thesis are devoted to these different understandings and what they entail for the moral justification of CEO pay. Another reason for the conflicting views on CEO pay stems from how issues of justice go beyond the confines of economics and applied ethics, extending all the way into the domain of political philosophy. Parts of this thesis explore this connection, in particular how the concept of economic desert relates to the broader concept of moral desert. Lastly, I discuss the criticism that the superrich (including executives) are being paid too much and are in possession of too much wealth. The issue at hand here is how to morally justify the interventions that seem suitable to rectify the situation.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are typically paid great amounts of money in wages and bonuses by commercial companies. This is sometimes defended with an argument from peer comparison; roughly that “our” CEO has to be paid in accordance with what other CEOs at comparable companies get. At first glance this seems like a poor excuse for morally outrageous pay schemes and, consequently, the argument has been ignored in the previous philosophical literature. In contrast, however, this article provides a partial defence of the argument from peer comparison. Moreover, it is demonstrated how a serious consideration of this argument sheds further light on both incentive- and desert-based theories of just pay.